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Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Promises, Promises!!

Last night's CBS story on Ethiopia brought me a feeling of deja vu, for such stories are found frequently in China's adoption program as well. The following article is taken from our subscription blog, but has been modified to protect the families involved.

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There is one characteristic of parenting common to all of us. It is so strong, that parents will sometimes give up their child in order to fulfill this desire. In poor areas, this impulse is particularly strong.

It is the desire that a child have a better life than its parents.

While much is spoken about the financial payments involved in many orphanage programs, a lessor-known program involves no money, but a simple promise: That a child will be provided a rich family to raise it, that the child will be given a great education, resulting in a successful life. This promise, often combined with promises of a "returning child", is a very strong incentive for any loving parent, but especially a parent that views such "blessings" as impossible to provide themselves.

We recently did a birth parent search in Luoyang City, Henan Province. Luoyang is the largest adopting orphanage in Henan Province, having submitted over a 100 children for adoption in 2008. My wife and I had visited Luoyang in late 2004 to perform finding location research for a group of families, and one family with a child adopted from Luoyang wanted us to return to search for their daughter's birth family.

The orphanage had told the adoptive family that their daughter had been found as a three-week old infant in a local park. Given the age and finding location, it was assumed that locating the birth family would prove difficult, but the adoptive family wanted to proceed anyway. The adoptive family did have the name of their daughter's foster family, who had taken care of their daughter from the time that she arrived in the orphanage until she was adopted at almost four years old.

We decided to begin our research with the foster family. We arranged a meeting, unknown to the orphanage, and started our interview by asking if they had any information about where "Dang Mei Mei" had been found. The foster father looked confused for a second, and then said something that stunned my wife and me:

"She wasn't abandoned; she is our daughter."

"How is that possible?", we asked. We asked them to tell us their story.

When their daughter was three years old (not a few weeks as the adoptive family had been told), the foster father had been approached by a friend of the family, the local Civil Affairs director. He invited the foster father to lunch, and after getting some small-talk out of the way, informed the father that he (the director) had a connection with an orphanage in another city. This orphanage adopted children to the West, and these children were raised by Western families, were given good educations, and were thus insured a happy and prosperous life. "I wanted to tell you, that I can arrange for your daughter to be adopted to the West. Also, once she is grown, she will return to China to find you, and will then take care of you in your old age."

The father didn't know what to say, so he promised his friend he would get back to him. He returned home and told his wife what he had been told. After lengthy discussions, they concluded (against their daughter's maternal grandmother's wishes) to bring their daughter the six hours to Luoyang.

The birth family was very excited when we found them again. When we asked them why they hadn't told the adoptive family the true nature of their relationship before, the father said simply, "Because we knew they would not have adopted our daughter if we had." They also asked when the adoptive family would be able to bring their daughter back to see them. The conversation gave us to believe that the family felt that the adoption arrangement was temporary, and that in reality the girl still belonged to them. They viewed it as they would a grand-parent arrangement so common in China, engaging in it to provide resources and opportunities the parents couldn't provide themselves.

When we told the family that in the vast majority of cases the children will never be able to find their birth family, and that the orphanage had lied to the adoptive family about their daughter's history to prevent the adoptive family from ever finding the birth family, it dawned on the family that they had been deceived. While they are lucky that they were found, most birth families will wait patiently for a day of reunification that will never come.

It is doubtful that adoptive families are prepared to learn that their child's birth family relinquished their child simply to have them raised in an affluent lifestyle, but with no understanding that the birth families are expecting their child to one day leave the adoptive family to return to China and reunify with the birth family. Thus, Luoyang's program also deceives adoptive families, placing an emotional time-bomb into the adoptive family's relationships that will one day detonate into severe trouble and confusion, especially in the adoptive child.

I can't tell you how livid I was to learn of Luoyang's program, and its potentially devastating impact on both biological and adoptive families. More distressing still is the realization that such programs are common, and used by many orphanages to recruit children for their international adoption programs. Consider this story told by one adoptive mother who adopted from an orphanage that has a program similar to Luoyang's:

While in China on their adoption in Jiangxi Province, the adoptive mother asked her guide if orphanages pay for children: "He said that women (families) are told that if they give the child to the SWI they will send the baby to America where she will grow up in a rich family - and when the girl grows up she will be educated and wealthy and she will come looking for her real family. She will come back to China and take care of them. When orphanage directors get together they ask each other if they have put their own granddaughter up for IA - and then they ask if the granddaughter has come back yet to make them rich. Then they all laugh...that was the punchline. This joke has nothing to do with saving children from being left on the side of the road in a box. . . ."

A few months ago we contacted a Jiangxi director about the change in directors at the CCAA, and in the course of that conversation she told us that last August the CCAA began a new program in "one of the Jiangxi orphanages" whereby it was broadcast to local families that if they were poor, or had only a single parent, etc., they could bring their child to the orphanage and she would then be adopted to a Western family. It appears that the CCAA, and the Chinese government, in a desperate attempt to keep the engine of international adoption running, is now removing the risk of abandonment and emotionally coercing birth families to give up their children.

One can see probable examples of this program in orphanages in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Guangxi, and other Provinces. Many orphanages in these areas have seen huge spikes in older-child referrals over the past year. Guangzhou, for example, has seen submissions for older, healthy children increase over 600% in 2008.

To those familiar with the adoption programs in Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Ethiopia, Romania, and the rest, China's issues fall into a pattern seen virtually in every country that adopts internationally. Whether it is the offering of money for children, or the simple offering of promises of a bright future for a child and the financial support Western-educated "Lucky" children in the birth parent's old age, many orphanages are still seeking ways to bring more children into the IA program.

I'm assuming that this scenario was not used in the late 1990's...?? I would think it was sometime after IA was well established and after abandonments started decreasing for this strategy to be used as a way to increase the pool of available children. Just wondering about my own daughters' situations...

P.S. On a related note, how common would you guess it might be for rural village women in China to act as "surrogates" if paid money and told the children they bore would be well educated in foreign countries after IA? Is this just a wild thought??

Conventional wisdom is that these problems began when IA demand grew larger than the supply of children the orphanages were naturally able to provide. Evidence suggests this was in 1999-2000, but of course varies from area to area. As far as women having babies to sell, that has already been proven to be happening.

Brian, I won't say this could never happen because anything (and everything) has probably happened at least once... but are you suggesting that anything but the smallest fraction of the 300,000+ Chinese adoptees currently living in the USA have birth families who were tricked into "lending" them to US families to raise and educate so they could come back to China and support them?

Doesn't that make them sound rather stupid? I know many people in China are poor but I've never for even an instance entertained the thought that they might be of less than average intelligence.

You said: "When we asked them why they hadn't told the adoptive family the true nature of their relationship before, the father said simply, "Because we knew they would not have adopted our daughter if we had."

That implies that they knew how ridiculous this whole idea is. Did they think the child would somehow find them on her own? Without her adoptive family's help? How often did they think they sort of thing happens? Seriously, they couldn't have known anyone that it actually happened to because it's not that common for AP's to have contact with foster families.

My impression of most Chinese people is that they are extremely proud and such a request would be absurd. Are you telling me that this is a common assumption that adopted kids will seek them out and support them later? Either by moving back to China and working or sending support payments?

It sounds so much like a scam that I can't believe anyone would fall for it. And when you consider that the commodity being traded is a CHILD it's even harder to imagine that anyone would pay such a hefty price. Especially without some absolute guarantees.

Our 2nd daughter's foster family was really hard to track down but we did it (mostly by luck) and we flew back to China for a month and visited them. Before that trip, we weren't sure they were her birth family but now we're pretty sure of it. But they never asked us for anything.

The average Chinese family would never see this as a scam. Most of these families are rural farmers that see nothing but poverty and hard work ahead for their children. The orphanage approaches them and promises their wildest dream -- a prosperous and happy life for their child. To be honest, I know few families in China that WOULDN'T take the offer. Whether the child will return or not is at this point only theoretical -- the birth families have no way of knowing what is being told to the adoptive families.

How often is this happening? The largest orphanage in Henan is doing it, the second largest orphanage in Jiangxi is doing it, and, and based on the witness of the adoptive mother quoted in the essay, several other directors. Another director in Jiangxi indicated such a program is being officially sanctioned. Seems likely that it is a very common practice.

Of course it's happening! Why wouldn't it be? It costs close to 100,000 to pay a snakehead to bring a child abroad and with no assurance the child will be taken care of like an IA provides. Parents pay traffickers to get kids across international borders into hard lives of prostitution or slavery. Parents take the scary chance of paying for a dangerous smuggling attempt to get kids to the US in the bottom of fishing boats or in cargo containers. Why not use a system that is much more legal and safe and maybe even free!Many older children who are now coming through the SN route may be told what is expected of them not unlike other adoption programs.I think adoptive parents who are paying huge sums of money with no information about the childrens origins have sucker written all over them!

Brian writes:"A few months ago we contacted a Jiangxi director about the change in directors at the CCAA, and in the course of that conversation she told us that last August the CCAA began a new program in "one of the Jiangxi orphanages" whereby it was broadcast to local families that if they were poor, or had only a single parent, etc., they could bring their child to the orphanage and she would then be adopted to a Western family. It appears that the CCAA, and the Chinese government, in a desperate attempt to keep the engine of international adoption running, is now removing the risk of abandonment and emotionally coercing birth families to give up their children."

To me, this doesn't sound like emotional coercion. It sounds like giving people who may be unable to care for a child a chance of providing for this child. Don't we do this with teen moms here in America? We don't make them abandon the baby on the side of a road. We tell them that there is no shame in saying that they cannot care for a baby, and we tell them that adoption is an honorable alternative. Isn't this true? Admittedly, it's very wrong to tell them that these children will then return some day to care for them. But, really, would most people actually believe that? What's really wrong is making people abandon their babies because they aren't allowed to bring a child they can't care for to an orphanage. This, in my opinion, breeds the most corruption because then baby-sellers can prey on the parents who see no other way.

Brian,you are always writing bad things about adoption in China but you got (I think) 3 daughters from China and you get money with the fiding adds. I really don't understand you. If you believe in all those bad things, why don't you try to find your daughters's birth parents and live the girls with them?.

I have one desire -- to bring information to families and their children about their histories. That information includes finding ads, DVDs, photos, etc. But it also involves how they came to be in the orphanages to begin with. I have never understood the idea that if I try to bring China's issues to light that I should somehow just walk away.

Sorry if what I write disturbs you, but in the majority of cases it has implications to adoptive families.

The issues came to light in late 2005, after I had completed my last adoption. In the mean time, we have located the birth family of one of my daughters and learned that she was brought to the orphanage through an incentive program, and that the birth parents had been deceived.

Brian, you said "I understand the desire to continue to believe in the "abandoment" myth, but please realize that in a majority of cases it is just that -- a myth."

Did you really mean to say "majority of cases"?

Obviously huge social and economic pressure is put on Chinese families who violate family planning laws but wouldn't you have to know the personal circumstances of a huge sampling of abandonments to be able to state that "the majority" of babies adopted internationally were not really abandoned? How many birth families have you spoken to?

We just concluded a birth parent search for nineteen families in Jiangxi Province. Of those nineteen, NONE of the children were actually abandoned. Additionally, we are looking at the Hunan records, and in many thousands of cases from those orphanages (going back to 2001) nearly all were brought to the orphanages by traffickers and others. Thus, in those orphanages, nearly every child was NOT abandoned.

Now, there are abandonments, but the cases where one can actually interview someone who truly simply "found" a child are a very, very small minority.

Well, we do work under two different definitions. If a child is given up for no consideration, I call that abandoned. If a child is given up for money or promises of future benefits, I call that coercion, because absent those payments or promises the child would NOT have been abandoned. If a child is taken unwillingly from a family, I call that kidnapping.

I believe that any parent who could be enticed by a one-time payment to give up their child is probably already in dire enough circumstances to be unable to keep the child. Removing that enticement doesn't remove all of the other problems. It doesn't mean they'll keep the baby. It probably just means they'll find another way to unburden themselves of her.

As you know, the political and economic pressures on families in China (especially poor families who violate family planning laws) are impossible for most Americans to comprehend. I can't imagine giving up my child for ANYTHING. But I'm not starving or hiding from the government or facing impossible fines.

If I was in those dire straights, the promise of a better life for the baby I can't keep would be attractive.

The amounts of money that we have seen paid range from 3,000 to 6,000 yuan. That is when the program is strictly money-based. There are also programs that pay less money, but increase the attractiveness by promising a great future for the child.

If you can think of a way to make giving up a child attractive, you can be someone in China has thought of it too.

Thank you for this article! We, as Americans, need to get EDUCATED, and stop coming up with excuses for taking other peoples children! Education is truely the key! When we adopted from Ethiopia, it was because we kept hearing about adoption in church, and CWA did a REALLY good job of convincing us the girls would be prostitutes if we didnt 'save' them. Five years later we are still paying off a loan for children from a well off family, who didnt have access to US visas, and this was their opportunity! sick... The pain and heartache caused to these kids is unbelieveable. Shame on these agencies. Lying on both ends to make a buck. Selling humans. Other then medical special needs adoptions, Im pretty sure its across the board, all pretty unethical...Thanks again!